The Genesis of Morals

Human beings want things to be OK, by which I mean that we desire that our deepest desires will be fulfilled. We want everything to turn out all right in the end. This desire can be urgent and pervasive because life is often pretty tough. Furthermore, it is evident that often things do not turn out all right. Voilà: God is born. God is an entity, or a force, or a law, that assures things will indeed turn out all right in “the end” … or after (the end of one’s present life on Earth). 

But for this to be the case, God must not only be supremely powerful and knowledgeable but also care about us. God must have our best interests at heart and want us to be happy. This is why God gives us not only some kind of perfect compensation after all our trials and losses have occurred, but also faith while they are occurring. 

But this also means that when awful things do happen to us, it cannot possibly be God who is responsible for them. A perfectly good (meaning here, note, only that God wants us to be happy) and all-powerful and all-knowing God would not impose such suffering on us. Nor would such a God – the kind we need to sustain our faith in everything turning out OK in the end – even allow such suffering to occur … unless it were in service to a greater good (where, again, “good” connotes only something conducing to our happiness or the fulfilment of our deepest desires). 

And so these two ideas come together to yield the conclusion that the responsibility for bad stuff happening to people belongs to a being or beings other than God, and one on whom God has bestowed the great good of freewill. Freewill explains not only how this bad stuff could happen, but also why someone other than God is bad (i.e., bears us ill will or at best is simply indifferent to our happiness) for making it happen. 

Now let us pause a moment to consider where morality fits into this picture. So far I have characterized both the goodness of God and the badness of some agent or agents other than God in terms of our desires and theirs. We human beings very strongly want or like certain things, and God wants us to have them. But we also tend to call something that we want or like “good,” and one of these things we like is that God wants us to have these good things, so God is good too. However, there is an equivocation here, for the goodness of what we want or like is, first and foremost, simply its being something we want or like; but when we apply “good” to an agent, such as God, we mean more (or other) than that we like God but also that God possesses a certain moral quality. We not only like this God; we approve and commend him. Voilà: Morality is born. 

Also in this moral sense we say that God does good (or right) things – again, now not only because we like them but also because they have a moral quality. Similarly for human beings who (in the image of God) do or like things we don’t like: They are bad (or wrong) morally as well as non-morally. The fundamental assumption of the moral regime is that when something bad happens, somebody other than God is responsible, both non-morally and morally, for its happening. Even when something bad (in the non-moral sense) happens that is clearly beyond human powers, such as an earthquake or a tornado, there is a responsible agent other than God: Satan. So at one and the same time that a person (other than God) is made guilty of wrong-doing, God Herself is exonerated of wrong-doing. 

And, indeed, that is the whole point of morality: to assure the goodness and existence of an entity that assures everything will turn out all right in the end. Thus, our desire to be happy induces in us a belief in the goodness of God and the badness of people. If we could accept that bad things (“bad” here in the non-moral sense of something painful) happen as a matter of course, then we would need neither attribution. 

Morality has, nevertheless, survived the supposed death of God. Even as they discern the absurdity of believing in God, secularist moralists have not really given up God. For they retain freewill, since they could not hold anyone responsible for wrong-doing if we did not have the capacity not to do it. But freewill for this purpose – that is, this kind of freewill (for there is an alternative type that is perfectly compatible with not being held morally responsible) – is as much a supernatural concoction as God, and, as noted, was only devised to get God off the hook for bad stuff happening. If there is no God, then there is no reason to preserve freewill other than to preserve that other relic of theism, morality. 

Furthermore, moral freewill was a problematic notion to begin with. For its existence was justified as a good that compensates for the bad stuff its use might inflict. But what kind of good is that? In what way is this power of choice a counterbalance to any pain it might cause? It seems to me that an equivocation lurks within this concept. For on the one hand it appears to be a non-moral notion because it is canceling non-moral pain; on the other hand, it appears to be a moral notion because it cancels pain not by eliminating it but by making us somehow nobler than a being who isn’t free … even if we freely choose to do wrong. It is a power that accounts for human beings (and the angels) being in the very image of God. 

But this means that moral goodness has two dimensions: It has to do not only with making the right choices, but also with having the power to make right or wrong choices. Thus, even Satan is good and God-like in the second sense. 

This is interesting, but it’s also a mess. And, just as with the morality that freewill sustains, we would, I suggest, be better off to stop twisting our concepts and consciences in knots and hand-wringing, and dispense with the lot of them, starting with God. (This is what I call “hard atheism.”)

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